Byron Grush was born and raised in Naperville, Illinois, just southwest of Chicago. He is a third generation native of that town. His grandfather, Alexander Grush, was a prominent citizen who served as mayor during the depression years of the early 1930s. Mayor Grush ran a soup kitchen and facilitated many WPA projects including the building of Naperville’s Centennial Beach, a converted stone quarry that attracts many new residents. Byron’s father, Byron Senior, was born above the meat market downtown in that city.

Grush studied art and design and taught at The Art Institute of Chicago, creating a course in film animation in the mid-seventies. He later became an Associate Professor at the College of Art at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, Illinois, where he taught in the Electronic Media area. He is the author of a book on hand-drawn animation techniques entitled The Shoestring Animator. He and his wife moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1990s, and opened an art gallery featuring Outsider and Visionary Art. They returned to the Midwest to retire in the small town of Delavan, Wisconsin, a place that reminds them of their roots. He is also the author of two historical fiction novels, All The Way By Water, and Once Upon a Gold Rush, both of which expand upon the probable history of his pioneer ancestors.